The methods and technologies for creating, updating, and delivering applications and services have evolved over the past several years. Whereas in the past network operators would primarily create and deliver new services by deploying custom hardware loaded with custom software, the modern moves toward network virtualization has enabled network operators to create and provide services on new types of platforms with drastically shortened time-to-market and/or time-to-live goals.
For example, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (“ETSI”) network functions virtualization (“NFV”), software defined networking (“SDN”), and other “cloud” computing architectures and technologies have resulted in a change to the traditional hardware-software model by enabling network operators to create and deploy services on commercial-off-the-shelf (“COTS”) hardware instead of the custom hardware and custom software combinations relied on in years past. This move can enable flexibility in terms of scaling, locating, and/or using the services. While virtualization may provide flexibility to network operators and other entities, several challenges pose difficulties in migrating services to virtualized networks.
With the rapidly evolving nature of networks, has come an accompanying rapidly evolving nature of security needs and considerations. Whereas custom hardware and/or software may have been located in a protected physical environment in years past, the new model of virtualization means that many custom applications and/or services can be deployed to network-accessible hardware, thereby enabling hacking or other malicious activities via network access (instead of physical access). Because the security needs for a particular network can evolve quickly, application or service creators may not be able to plan for every possible security risk for a particular application or service, resulting in constantly emerging vulnerabilities that may not be addressed at service creation time.